Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Four Agreements, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Judgment and Fear
Beliefs, Agreements, and Transformative Happiness
Human Perception, Reality, and Universal Love
Childhood, Adulthood, and Freedom
Summary
Analysis
Ruiz believes that everything humanity perceives is a dream. The mind perpetually dreams. The dreams are framed in a linear way when we are awake and in a nonlinear way when we are asleep—but in both cases, we are still dreaming. Humans are born with the capacity to dream, and we are taught to dream in the way that society dreams (“the dream of the planet”). We learn to dream like society by focusing our attention on the authority figures that teach us, like our parents, teachers, and religious officiants. The “dream of the planet” includes concepts like what to believe, how to behave, what’s good and bad, what’s beautiful and ugly, and many other things. These concepts “hook” us through language, which is like a code full of agreements that we all understand.
Here, Ruiz extends his dream metaphor to explain that belief systems can be changed. A dream stands for human perception: humans learn to perceive and understand the world according to what they’re told by others (“the dream of the planet”). This socially-enforced worldview includes beliefs about what exists as well as how to behave, which means that people are conditioned to act in certain ways rather than making their own choices. However, Ruiz likens beliefs and language to agreements to show that humans always have a choice about what we agree to, and can change our beliefs at any time.
Themes
Ruiz calls this process “the domestication of humans.” Domestication teaches us how to live and what to believe. As children, we are domesticated the same way animals are: by a system of punishment and reward. When children do what adults want, they are rewarded with attention (for example, the adult says things like “good girl”). Fearing punishment (rejection) and craving reward (attention) makes us act the way others act. Eventually, we become so good at this that we no longer need our parents to domesticate us or teach us to “dream” in a certain way. We learn to domesticate ourselves by punishing ourselves when we don’t follow the rules and rewarding ourselves when we do.
Ruiz explains how people are indoctrinated to adopt a particular belief system, a process he calls “domestication” because he believes that children are both wild and free before they learn to behave according to certain belief systems. His aim is to undo the domestication process and teach people how to be free again. Ruiz finds the domestication method of punishment and reward problematic because he believes it damages the human psyche.
Themes
Ruiz says that when human beings are domesticated, we internalize all our “agreements” into a mental “Book of Law” which we use to constantly judge ourselves and others. When we judge ourselves, part of ourselves is a “Victim” who believes we are not good enough, and part of ourselves is a “Judge” who reinforces that “Yes, you are not good enough.” When we break the rules in our internal book, we experience fear, blame, guilt, and shame. When we comply, we feel safe.
Ruiz argues that people learn to talk to themselves in their minds and that the internal voices that develop from the system of punishment and reward are critical and negative: one voice judges and the other feels shame for being judged. Together, the two voices make a person feel perpetually inadequate, which disconnects them from the feeling of love and therefore prevents them from perceiving truth.
Themes
For Ruiz, “true justice” is only paying once for each mistake we make, but domestication makes us pay many times for our mistakes. We judge ourselves when we make a mistake, but also every time we remember a mistake and every time somebody else reminds us of our mistake. Effectively, we feel perpetually guilty and constantly punish ourselves or create “emotional poison.” Ruiz believes that 95 percent of the agreements we have internalized are false and that “we suffer because we believe all these lies.”
Since Ruiz believes that everyone is made of light and love, agreements (or beliefs about how to behave) that create the habit of mental suffering are based in lies: they deny a person the ability to connect with their true, loving self. The key, then, to reorienting a person toward their true nature is by targeting the false agreements (or beliefs) they were taught as a child.
Themes
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Furthermore, people’s individual dreams may differ, but the “dream of the planet”—on a global level—is characterized by fear, injustice, violence, and war. Essentially, it’s a “nightmare” that’s controlled by fear. In fact, the “dream of human society” sounds quite a bit like the “hell” that many religions speak of—both are places of fear, suffering, punishment, and pain. We also learn to dream “hell” or “nightmares” in our personal dreams when we experience jealousy, hatred, and fear.
The collective human worldview (the “dream” of human society, or the “dream of the planet”) consists of rules and codes to live by that most people share in common, including laws and social expectations. Even though Ruiz calls the collective worldview one dream, he clarifies here it’s actually billions of individual personal dreams that all look similar because they share the similar beliefs about what is true and right.
Themes
We are all searching for truth, justice, and beauty, because it is absent in our personal and social nightmares. The problem is that these things are already within and around us, but we can’t see them because the agreements and beliefs we have stored within us—or the dream that we have been taught—obscures our vision and we live in a “fog.” Ruiz thinks everything that humans believe we are is an illusion which restricts our freedom.
The common beliefs that most people have—when they perceive the world the way most other people do—are problematic because they limit a person’s ability to act on the basis of love, which restricts their behavior and therefore their freedom. Ruiz argues that because these beliefs are false because they disconnect a person from the experience of love, which he considers to be the highest truth.
Themes
Ruiz believes that we create an idea of perfection based on what will please others, like our parents and our society. We inevitably fail to live up this idea so we hide behind masks (to avoid rejection from others) and punish or abuse ourselves for failing to be perfect. In fact, Ruiz believes that nobody abuses us more than we abuse ourselves. Even our relationships are just toleration of abuse: if somebody abuses us less that we abuse ourselves, we’ll tolerate the relationship. Otherwise, we won’t. If we abuse ourselves a lot, we’ll even tolerate humiliation and violence from others. All this abuse stems from our image of perfection—because we fail to meet it, we can’t accept ourselves or others the way we are.
Ruiz argues that one of the central false beliefs most people share is the idea that a person needs to be perfect in order to be worthy of love from themselves or others. Ruiz believes this idea of perfection is false because a person is already made of love and therefore already worthy. For Ruiz, the association of perfection with worthiness is tantamount to self-abuse: it demands that a person hate themselves for being imperfect instead of loving and accepting themselves as being good enough.
Themes
Each person—including you—makes thousands of agreements with others, including your parents, partners, children, God, and society. However, the most important ones are the agreements you make with yourself in which you tell yourself who you are, what you believe, and what you’re capable of doing. Your agreements with yourself comprise your personality. Ruiz thinks that if you want to live a joyful, fulfilled, and empowered life, you must to be brave enough to break the agreements that are based in fear.
Ruiz characterizes holding beliefs as making agreements to behave certain ways toward others and toward oneself. He implies here that the key to living a better life is breaking harmful or limiting agreements and instead agreeing to act in a more positive way toward others and toward oneself. Ruiz’s central target is behavior that is rooted in fear.
Themes
Ruiz argues that humans are born with a certain amount of power that rebuilds every night. We usually spend all our power on keeping the agreements we have made, so we feel powerless and trapped in “the dream of the planet.” But if we don’t like our lives, we need to change the agreements we keep. Ruiz proposes that there are “four very powerful agreements” that will break apart the other fear-based agreements that use up all our energy—but it takes a lot of mental resolve to adopt them. Ruiz believes it’s worth it, though, as adopting them will return all our spent energy to us and our lives will be transformed. We can replace the “dream of hell” that we live in by creating a new dream of “heaven.”
Because the task of changing one’s entire belief system seems daunting, Ruiz reassures the reader here that every person already has the power they need to make a change. If a person changes their beliefs (or agreements to behave a certain way), they will free up their personal energy and power because it won’t be depleted by the cycle of suffering that he wants to dismantle. Doing so will be hard at first but get progressively easier as more and more energy is freed up by the process of change.
Themes
